"Such things are;" and while they are, they furnish ground for such philippics as the following; which I will insert, not because any calm unprejudiced person or one _not writing for preferment_ can agree with the pen of gall, but in the hope that America aroused at such anathemas, may exert her better self, give vigour to her laws, and blot out these foul deeds from the page of her history. Speaking of the principle of honour, the writer expresses himself thus:--"Honour alone {180} will indeed never make a great nation, but it will always preserve it from dwindling down into thorough contempt. It has done much more for France than ever virtue did. Without this semi-heroic principle she would have been detestable indeed. I say not that she was ever anything very desirable to boast of with it. America in this respect stands insulated from all the world. She has neither a spark of true magnanimity about her, nor any grace or colouring of it. She is equally destitute of honesty and honour, of substance and semblance. She set off without an established religion, and has now pretty well prepared herself for needing none." In another place he writes thus, "there is no saying what this same America may turn out in the lapse of ages, or how far that unprincipled Oligarchy may extend her growing plagues into futurity, which, at present, exhibits the young serpents crawling out of their beds of venom in every direction where the heavens may smile, or the air freshly blow upon them, &c."[62] Such sentiments as these, from a man professing himself a minister of "the meek and lowly Jesus," are little calculated to fascinate and render {181} any people the more inclined to a church establishment. _February 3d._ What transitions of temperature!--the frost yesterday was severe; the Schuylkill and even the Delaware frozen over, and skating the order of the day; the thermometer at ten degrees below freezing:--last night a heavy mild rain has fallen, and at mid-day now the thermometer is at 40°. HORRIBLE EXECUTION! I shall copy the account without comment; it needs none. Perpetrated among a people who call themselves christians, and who boast of being "the most free, the most enlightened, the most humane people on earth." "Augusta, (Georgia,) Feb. 1, A. D. 1820. "On Friday last, two negro men, named Ephraim and Sam, were executed in conformity to their sentence, for the murder of their master, Mr. Thomas Handcock, of Edgefield district, S. C.--Sam was burnt and Ephraim hung, and his head severed from his body, and publicly exposed. The circumstances attending the crime for which these miserable beings have suffered, were of a nature so aggravated, as imperiously demanded the terrible punishment which has been inflicted upon them. [They had shot their owner while he slept.]